& Solid State Stuff

Pretty soon I'm going to be looking to upgrade some things on my computer, starting with the hard drive. In addition to getting a large disk to begin using for archived anime (as opposed to the large stack of DVDs I've burned), I was going to get a solid-state disk to put my Windows 7 that I won in a raffle a couple weeks ago on.

For anyone not familiar with them, SSDs have the benefit that they have 0 seek time (as opposed to about 9 ms for HDs), combined with linear read speeds several times that of HDs. For very large and contiguous files, which involve only linear access, an SSD could be 3 or 4x as fast as an HD. But for accessing large numbers of small, non-contiguous files, which involve many seeks, the difference is much, much larger. Thus SSDs can be anywhere from substantially faster to massively faster than HDs, depending on the type of access.

But what exactly do I do with the SSD when I get it? Prior to Wednesday, the answer was obvious: use it as my boot drive. That is, put Windows and frequently used programs on it, and use a separate HD to put large and infrequently used stuff on.

Today, however, there's another option, thanks to the announcement of this evil little thing: a disk controller which combines an HD and an SSD, using the SSD as a massive cache for the much larger HD. That is, instead of having the SSD serve as a dedicated boot drive, it's used to cache frequently used files from all over the HD (when talking about an 80 gig cache, "frequently" probably amounts to once every week or two).

One obvious advantage is that the superior performance of the SSD is applied not just to system files (e.g. Windows), but also to anything on the disk that gets used frequently. Similarly, you don't need to let part of the SSD go to waste if you don't have enough files to fill it up (I'm told using an SSD as your boot drive takes 30-40 gigs of SSD, while higher end SSDs go up to 256 gigs). Another big benefit is that you don't have to manually split files that are normally on the boot drive (e.g. Program Files and the Users documents folder) between the SSD and HD depending on whether you want them fast or slow; for example, I wouldn't want to put downloaded anime on my (dedicated) SSD, nor would I want my SSD bloated with the various bulky compiler intermediates.

Now, the big question is how exactly this is going to work. According to the manufacturer, it requires a driver for Windows in order to work. This suggests that caching may all be done in software, rather than hardware. This brings up the obvious question: in what cases the cache will be used? If the cache is only used within the current Windows boot (essentially serving as a gigantic system cache), this won't be very useful, at least for me (perhaps for a database server, with multiple terabytes of database, a 100+ gig cache would be substantially beneficial). I already have 8 gigs of RAM, about 4 of which (at a minimum) is available to be used by the system cache, which is a pretty decent cache for one session (and RAM is much faster than an SSD, anyway).

From the write-up, however, it sounds like the cache at least persists between Windows boots, which would mean it wouldn't quite be that bad. However, if the caching is all software-based via a Windows driver, this obviously means that it won't be of any benefit prior to loading that driver - that is, during boot up/shut down and going into/out of hibernate, which are things I was hoping to gain out of getting an SSD.

I guess we'll find out when the thing ships, in 3 weeks or so.